Today I met with the folks at telecom start-up Ribbit that just launched this week. Inspite the latest media blitz about them (just look at Ribbit's news section!), the whole team of engineers and execs is crowded in a tiny office off El Camino in Mountain View without even a front desk. In a nutshell, Ribbit built a telecommunication platform/switch, the same AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon or others would have in their data centres to answer/transfer/etc... telephone calls. Except that this time, all the telephone functions are available through a Flash interface that can easily be embedded into a Web page, targeting the Flash/Flex developer community. The APIs are open and free. However, if you build an application using it, you'll have to pay a $29 fee per session plus the phone calls going through the Ribbit switch. But there will be a free "ad sponsored" for social networking sites and others alike.

"When we were thinking about creating Ribbit we thought of how would a telephone company look like if it was built today, using Internet technologies [...] It's certainly not a bunch of Asterisk servers bundle together! [...] When we call ourselves the Silicon Valley's phone company, we take the phone company part really really serious", Ted Griggs, Ribbit's CEO.

The full video of our interview with Griggs (pictured) after the jump.

With Ribbit Flash/Flex developers will also be able to make phone calls to popular IM services like Skype, Yahoo/MSN Messenger and GoogleTalk as well as any SIP compatible network/device. A new version of the platform will be released mid-January as well as the first applications.
I also asked a question about Adobe Pacifica i.e. Adobe's initiative to embed SIP and high quality audio codecs into Flash to enable P2P voice communication a-la Skype. For Griggs, Adobe Pacifica (client-side) is complementary to Ribbit (server-side) that can then itself take advantage of the better voice codecs.